Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Perhaps the varying positions on the current
immigration crises can be categorized into three buckets:

A.The Conservative Position – “They
broke our laws, round ‘em up and deport them.”
This in not going happen, not with this President or with this Senate. Nor is it necessarily the right thing to do. Do we really expect the Feds to do a clean
and surgical job of breaking into people’s home and carting them away?

B.The Libertarian Position – “Let
‘em stay and then sink or swim on their own merits just like in bygone
days.” This is also a pipe
dream. Clearly many immigrants will
become productive, self supporting citizens and a handful will even become
shining success stories. But many will also flounder and today’s America will
not let them hit bottom. Like it or not,
many will become long term wards of the welfare state.

C.The Progressive Position – “Bring
it on. We’ll take care of as many that
come for as long as necessary.” This
is untenable and immoral. It is the embodiment of Margaret Thatcher’s axiom
that, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other
people's money.”

The reality is that most of the immigrants are
here to stay and that, within a generation, about 30% of Americans will boast
of at least some Latino lineage. That
voting bloc will nurture fond memories of those whom they believe were good to
them and harbor resentments against those who were not.

My immigrant grandfather was an ardent New Deal
Democrat. Franklin Roosevelt was a god
in his home. Not only did he vote
Democrat until the day that he died, so did my Dad, except for that brief
moment when crazy long-hairs were burning flags in Sixties.

Liberals are building an electoral force that
may persist through the end of this century.
What to do?

Let me suggest a course of voluntary, positive
action to put immigrants on the path of becoming liberty loving Americans.

We all know that the Federal government is
using our tax dollars to collect up immigrants and stash them away in empty
spaces throughout the country. In
effect, they are planting the seeds of future political domination in each and
every state.

Freedom lovers can do the same. Big money libertarians and conservatives such
as the Koch Brothers should begin to pony up money to take immigrants out of
government hands and to place them into what I would call Liberty Boot
Camps. Additional funding should come
from the many American CEOs who are calling for immigration reform in order
create a cheaper labor pool.

In Liberty Boot Camp, newcomers would learn the
skills needed to survive in America and also be exposed the virtuous philosophy
of free markets, personal freedom and individual responsibility. Likewise they would be taught about the
horrors of overbearing and intrusive government.

As 501c3 organizations, these camps would
divert massive sums of money from government hands. That can never be bad.

Such a project should not rely only on checks
written by the big guys. Think tank
scholars from places like Cato, Mises, Acton, Heartland, Heritage and the
Manhattan institutes should design and teach an easy to learn freedom
curriculum. Ordinary, everyday people
can volunteer to help out. Not only will
this cut costs but it will allow immigrants to interact with friendly and
helpful Americans who cherish the American virtues of self reliance, neighborly
support and individual responsibility.
Think of this as one big Church-type mission to spread the liberty
gospel.

Finally, let’s get the newcomers to work. If we cannot get minimum wage requirements waived
for camp residents, let’s find a way to put them into “work study”, internship of
apprenticeship programs where they can gain skills to be self supporting and to
set out on their own. Perhaps the CEOs could create programs within their
companies.

I know that this sounds ambitious and
expensive. I am not a Pollyanna. But do remember that billions of your tax
dollars are already being spent to build a Progressive dynasty for decades to
come. It is the Tammany Hall and Chicago
patronage model on a grand scale.

As I am
sure that you are aware, the courts have reaffirmed the right of every resident
and visitor to our nation’s capital to defend themselves by carrying handguns
out with them in public.

I urge
you to stand with your freedom loving constituents and to take advantage of
this long lost liberty by carrying a hand gun to work with you in D.C. This will serve as vivid testimony to the
press, your colleagues and the voters back home that you take our Constitution
seriously.

I firmly
believe that a photo op of you and your staff, proudly standing up for the
Right to Bear Arms, right in front of the Capitol Building, will do much to win
the support and admiration of freedom lovers back in the Garden State.

I trust
you to do the right thing.

Sincerely,

Joe
Siano

For Democrats and other traditionally anti-gun
legislators, a somewhat different approach is recommended.

As I am
sure that you are aware, the courts have reaffirmed the right of every resident
and visitor to our nation’s capital to defend themselves by carrying handguns
out with them in public.

Truth be
told, Washington, D.C. is no different than New Jersey. Every day, poor inner city dwellers are terrorized
by thugs, gangs and violent criminals.
Our overworked police forces are unable to protect these deserving
citizens who are trapped in a cesspool of violence. They cannot feel safe walking to the corner
store, sending their kids to school or just sitting outside of their own front
doors.

That is
why I am asking you to lead by example.
I am urging you to capitalize upon our Capital’s newfound liberty by
wearing a hand gun to work.

The
example that you set will send a message to your beleaguered constituents that
“we are not going to take it anymore! We
are going to take back our streets, our neighborhoods, our parks, playgrounds
and cities from the scum who have held us hostage for too long. We are not afraid, we will stand and fight.”

And you
sir, will stand tall, leading the charge to reclaim New Jersey’s cities for
decent, hardworking Americans.

I trust
that you will do the right thing and make us proud.

If you
do not own a weapon, the fine folks at the NJ Second Amendment Society will be
happy to assist in finding what best suits your needs.

Sincerely,

Joe
Siano

I ask every reader to send such a letter to his
or her representatives. I also ask that
you keep me posted with their responses.
Post it on Facebook or as a comment to this article. You may feel free to use the above letters as
a template. The 2 Percent Blog legal
team assures me that you can do so without fear of copyright infringement or incurring
royalty fees.

This is once in a lifetime opportunity to call our
elected representatives on the carpet regarding this fundamental right.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

The American Left and its political arm, the Democrat Party,
built a solid electoral base within the European immigrant community of bygone
days. In her book, The
Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,
Doris Kearns Goodwin recounts how an ambitious young Joe Kennedy was rebuffed
by Boston's patrician Republican elite. An angry Joe hitched up with the Democrats and
sired a political dynasty. In Parish Priest,
historian David Brinkley recounts how Nineteenth Century Irish immigrants
were unwelcome in WASPy New Haven.

The Left found a receptive audience for their schemes of
guaranteed employment, social services and cradle to grave security among these
ill educated yet hard working newcomers.
They
are playing that game to this day.

However, one young Jewish immigrant from Russia wasn't
buying it. Ayn Rand saw firsthand the
failure of state socialism and the misery that it created in her homeland. Despite coming to America with a near-zero
proficiency in English, Rand set upon a career in writing and found work in
Hollywood.

Collectivists are hard pressed to deny the atrocities that
occurred in Rand's native Russia or in other communist nations. Therefore they have chosen a novel means of
attack. They reproach her for her
Godless, "anti-Christian" philosophy.

Is this the best that these hypocrites, this brood of wipers
who booed God at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, can come up with?

OK, so she is an atheist.
Got it. So is about half of
Western Europe and North America. So is
every Marxist, and proud of it too. So
they got her on the first four commandments which relate to man's relationship
and duties to his Maker. On the other
hand she is probably at par with most of her leftist critics in this regard.

Despite her hard hearted public persona, she evidently
honored her mother and father as she tried for years to rescue them from the
Soviet Union. Maybe Lefties are nice to
their moms and dads too. I'll give them
that much.

However, on the backside of the Decalogue, those
Commandments that relate to how we treat each other, Rand has her Leftie detractors
beat hands down.

Let's start with C-10, the admonition against coveting. The Left is all about envy and coveting. Redistribution is all about having what
others earned without the bother of producing it yourself. Rand was all about producing. Atlas
Shruggedis all about
Producers Paradise.

Because they are covetous, Collectivists have no qualms
whatsoever with lying, stealing or killing in the name of the Almighty State. They employ whatever means is necessary, from
brute force to currency inflation to confiscate honestly earned wealth and to
redirect it to favored constituents.

Rand, on the other hand, preached a gospel of nonviolence
and respect. She stood tall for the
inviolable dignity and property of each and every human being.

This leaves us with the Commandments on sexual sin. I won't go down that rat hole because pretty
much no one passes the purity test.
Still, there are many well documented accounts of Statist
regimes forcing women into prostitution.
Rand wins again!

Brand's chief vulnerability is in her open advocacy of
selfishness. In essence, her position is
an awkward reworking of Adam Smith's invisible hand. The point being that each person pursuing his
own lawful interest improves not only his own lot but that of the community as
well.

If you are a devout churchgoer, Rand may not be your cup of
tea socially. Still, she has done more
to advance the cause of peace, human dignity, freedom and prosperity than
almost anyone you can name. Best of all
she has exposed the truth that the kingpins of collectivism are wearing no
clothes. And for this, they can never
forgive her.

Liberals are particularly incensed that Rand rejects the
concept of altruism. Altruism is
the brainchild of August Comte, a Nineteenth Century Socialist. It taught that the individual was to measure
his actions based upon their impact on the community and not to his own
benefit. This is the exact opposite of
the invisible hand theory and runs counter to human nature.
Praxeology demonstrates that the ethical acting individual takes
action to improve his condition. In a
free society this often entails interacting and exchanging with others to each
party’s mutual benefit, despite “selfish” intentions. This individual autonomy that both Rand and
Smith acknowledge and encourage is intolerable to central planners who want to
shepherd a nation of sheeple, people who follow instructions blindly for a
supposed “greater good”.

For this, the Left hates Rand and wishes that she was the one
immigrant who they had turned back.

Monday, July 21, 2014

Chris Cantwell is a libertarian blogger who
self styles himself as being “Anarchist,
Atheist, Asshole”. Save
for the letter A in the second descriptor, we may be twins separated at birth.

Cantwell professes that his disdain for The
State and his disbelief in a deity are mutually exclusive, that one set of
beliefs does not inform or influence the other.
They are compartmentalized components of his psyche. I’ll take his word for that.

It is my contention that libertarianism is,
first and foremost, instinctive.
Libertarians are people who chafe at arbitrary man made rules, who are
confounded by the contradictions of authoritarians who impose their illogic
with force.

Our instinctive response leads many of us to
seek intellectual justification and social reinforcement for our feelings. As I see it, libertarians rest their
philosophical case on one of three
distinct, but not entirely exclusive, traditions. These are the:

1.Objectivist moral philosophy Ayn Rand

2.Economics based Anarcho-Capitalist of Murray
Rothbard and most modern Austrian economists

3.Classic liberalism of John Locke and fee market
economics of Adam Smith which provided the intellectual grounding of the
American Revolution and informs true American Conservatism

All three traditions share the concept of
individual self ownership. This radical
notion was first articulated by John Locke the late Seventeenth Century:

“The natural liberty of man is to be free from
any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative
authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule “

“(E)very man has a property in his own person:
this nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work
of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”

Some 290 years later
Rothbard concurred:

The most viable method of elaborating the
natural-rights statement of the libertarian

position is to divide it into
parts, and to begin with the basic axiom of the "right to
self-ownership." The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of
each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a human being, to "own" his
or her own body; that is, to control that body free of coercive interference.
Since each individual must think, learn, value, and choose his or her ends and
means in order to survive and flourish, the right to self-ownership gives man
the right to perform [p. 29] these vital activities without being hampered and
restricted by coercive molestation. (For a New Liberty)

Ayn Rand summarizes:

Individualism
regards man -- every man -- as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses
an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a
rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form
of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved
only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights -- and that
a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its
members.

Theist libertarians, such as
I, must dissent from the theory of absolute self ownership in one very
significant detail. As Locke explains,
we are not absolute owners. Rather we
endowed with a proprietary custodianship of our temporal bodies by “Nature’s
God” who created us.

“But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is
not a state of license: though man in that state have an uncontroulable liberty
to dispose of his person or possessions, yet
he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in
his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for
it. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every
one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult
it, that being all equal and
independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or
possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and
infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the
world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose
workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's pleasure:
and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of
nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may
authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another's uses,
as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours. Every one, as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his
station willfully.”

And beyond our lives,
neither are we free to forfeit our liberty, for to do so is tantamount to
surrendering our humanity:

“This freedom
from absolute, arbitrary power, is so necessary to, and closely joined with a
man's preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his
preservation and life together: for a man, not having the power of his
own life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one,
nor put himself under the absolute, arbitrary power of another, to take away
his life, when he pleases. Nobody can
give more power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away his own life,
cannot give another power over it.”

Thus a Theist libertarian,
particularly a Catholic such as yours truly, must first and foremost insist
upon the sanctity of life and all that that implies. In our eyes, liberty is founded on the
priceless value of each and every human being born and unborn, young or old,
healthy or near death. Death by drone, “preemptive”
war, abortion, terrorism, euthanasia or heavy handed law enforcement is never
the answer.

Secondly, we will insist on
the full right to practice our Faith.
This means more than praying together in a room each weekend. We demand freedom from State or majority
coercion to accommodate those things that violate our conscience in the
workplace and in our business dealings.

Nonetheless theist, agnostic
and atheist libertarians have plenty of common ground to share. We all believe:

·In the non
aggression principle

·That war is
murder – of the people we kill and those that we sacrifice

In the area of personal yet
victimless “immorality” we find common cause.
The Church’s two preeminent philosophers did not believe that the civil authorities should prosecute victimless crime. Such
personal sins were evidence of man’s imperfection and were best left to be
dealt with between him and his Maker.

As one might expect, many of
us believing libertarians feel a knot in our stomachs when the conversation among
our libertarian friends turns to abortion and euthanasia. Remember that we, like Hebrew National,
report to a higher authority.

So let’s agree to live by
the adage of that masterful politician Ronald Reagan, “My eighty-percent friend
is not my twenty-percent enemy”

Thank you, friend, for
reading this. We have of much work ahead
to dismantle The State. The rest can be
sorted out later.